Maybe
twenty years ago, Father Leo R. Ward gave me a little book that was printed
privately in 1900, copies of which had mysteriously turned up at Saint Mary's
College.

Written by one Charles Veneziani as a sort of reverse encyclical—subtitled
a layman's "Circular Letter to the Archbishops, Bishops and Prominent
Clergy of the United States"—it was a wholesale attack on Notre Dame by a
disgruntled former professor. Its title: <A Plea for Higher Education of
Catholic Young Men of America with an Exposure of the Frauds of the University
of Notre Dame, Ind.>

Veneziani taught at the University from 1896 to 1899 at an annual salary of
$600 plus a housing allowance. On the edges of his 91-page indictment one gets
precious glimpses of a long-ago Notre Dame through admittedly angry eyes.

Among his grievances were that he was not given a stall for his horse near
the Main Building, that his salary was cut when a course he was to give to
"waiter-students" was canceled, that the lay faculty were rowdy and
intemperate and in any case regarded as only an expedient until vocations to the
C.S.C. increased, and that he was lied to by the president when they chatted on
the veranda of the main building. Father John Zahm figures prominently in
Veneziani's plaint, but the C.S.C.s, priests and brothers, are described as
woefully undertrained for the task of teaching.

A recurrent motif of the accusation is that Notre Dame, in a Spanish-language
catalogue, offered several "honorary doctorates" to graduates who
later distinguished themselves, an offer not echoed in the English-language
catalogue. Veneziani was disdainful of his lay colleagues—they sound like
Bernard DeVoto's father who spent years at Notre Dame as "a perpetual
student and part-time professor." Significantly, Veneziani complains of the
school's emphasis on baseball and football in attracting students.

Perhaps the best way to think of Notre Dame is on the model of America's
Catholic immigrants. With rare exceptions, they entered at the bottom of the
social and cultural scale, and their history is one of a slow descent to
respectability and affluence, during which they were measured—and measured
themselves—by standards not so much secular at first as non- and
anti-Catholic. In the course of the past 150 years the ambience has gradually
changed from non-Catholic, more or less WASP, to secular.

To ponder Notre Dame and the American culture is thus to ask about the
shifting relationship between an altering effort and a context itself in
constant change.

When Archbishop Ireland preached a sermon called "The Catholic Church
and Liberal Education" on the occasion of Notre Dame's golden jubilee (not
celebrated, incidentally, until June 1895), he praised Father Sorin because
"he had faith in America and in the West; he had faith in the Catholic
Church in America." If country and church were to prosper and become great,
schools such as Notre Dame had to exist and flourish.

Ireland went on to recount the church's historical role as the conduit of
culture to the world, the monastic schools, the medieval universities....

John Ireland's parents brought him to America when he was a child; he lived
in St. Paul, Minnesota,—that no one would have accused of culture, and was
sent to minor and major seminaries in France. He returned as a young priest to
become chaplain to a Minnesota regiment in the Civil War. Magnificently put
before us in Marvin O'Connell's biography, John Ireland is an apt symbol of the
immigrant church which, despite its modest social standing, saw itself as
engaged in a missionary effort to bring Western culture as well as Christ to
this raw land.

The scene we discern through Veneziani's wrathful eye is the same one Ireland
gazed upon when he preached that golden-jubilee sermon. Archbishop Ireland was
American and Catholic to the soles of his feet, unabashedly a citizen of this
country and a prelate of his Church, a kind of George M. Cohan of the hierarchy.
Crude as its beginnings doubtless were, Notre Dame saw itself as a civilizing
force in this New World.

An anthology we used in school, Francis Beauchesne Thornton's <Return to
Tradition>, conveyed the thought that the American Catholic was, through his
faith, connected with the mainstream of Western culture. One had the heady
realization that the Puritans and other Protestants who founded what became our
prestige universities were actually on the cultural margin of things.

Norman Podhoretz, in <Making It>, suggests that New York Jews felt
somewhat the same way. However modest their origins, they regarded themselves as
bearing the message of continental culture to America. American Jews took those
Protestant universities as their field of labor; American Catholics set about
building their own system of higher education.

A pleasantly paradoxical situation, no doubt, but I wonder if it doesn't
capture the essence of Notre Dame. When I joined Notre Dame's philosophy
department in 1955, the dominant element was a Thomism mediated through such
figures as Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson and Charles De Koninck. My new
colleagues had taken their degrees at Toronto, Louvain, Laval, the Catholic
University or one of the Roman universities, with the notable exception of A.
Robert Caponigri.

This was still the heyday of the pre-Conciliar church, and there was an
exuberant confidence that, guided by Leo XIII's <Aeterni Patris>, a new
synthesis was a building that would create a distinctively modern Catholic
culture. On the basis of a shared Thomism, the department would reach out toward
phenomenology, analytic philosophy, philosophy of science, American philosophy—not
to join all those conflicting contemporary movements, but to fuse the best of
the old and new. No wonder Jacques Maritain—who lectured annually at Notre
Dame— served as a common symbol of our efforts.

This was the Catholic Church that converts such as Thomas Merton entered. I
never thought I 'd live long enough to see <The Seven Storey Mountain>
become an historical document, but it can now serve as a corrective to distorted
views of the preConciliar church that have become received opinion.

Gilson and Maritain, along with Dorothy Day, defined that Catholic milieu,
supported by Chesterton, Belloc, Mauriac, Bernanos and Claudel as well as Waugh
and Greene.

The social teachings of the Church, interpreted by her philosophers and
writers, provided a basis for criticism of—not simply assimilation into—the
wider culture.

Frank O'Malley taught a famous course in Catholic philosophy as conveyed in
our literature. The founding of the General Program in Liberal Education (it was
intended eventually to absorb the College of Arts and Letters) brought Otto Bird
to Notre Dame and exuded a confidence that the Catholic tradition of liberal
arts was the best way into the renewal of higher education. The Great Books
effort had in its turn been influenced by the Catholic tradition of liberal
education. There was <Commonweal>, there was <America>, there was
Sheed & Ward.

Bliss was it in that day to be alive, but very heaven to be young.

My first contact with Notre Dame was via Maisie Ward's life of Gilbert Keith
Chesterton, which I read as a boy in 1943 when it first appeared.

Chesterton had been at Notre Dame in the fall of 1930, lecturing evenings in
Washington Hall to audiences of 600 on Victorian literature and Victorian
political figures, 36 lectures in all. The new stadium was dedicated while he
was here, and he wrote a commemorative poem about Notre Dame football, called
"The Arena":

I have seen, where a strange country Opened its secret plains about me, One
great golden dome stand lonely with its golden image, one Seen afar, in strange
fulfillment, Through the sunlit Indian summer That Apocalyptic portent that has
clothed her with the Sun.

And I saw them shock the whirlwind Of the world of dust and dazzle: And
thrice they stamped, a thunderclap; and thrice the sand-wheel swirled; And
thrice they cried like thunder On Our Lady of the Victories The Mother of the
Master of the Masterers of the World.

Reading Chesterton stirred in the mind of a youngster who came from an Irish
family of modest means and nine children a sense of the possible interweaving of
faith and learning. And it was fateful that that combination should have been
linked with Notre Dame.

And football. There are purists who lament the identification in the public
mind of Notre Dame and football. They are wrong. American higher education and
athletics grew together: "Varsity," after all, is a version—critics
would say a corruption—of "university." When Edgar Rice Burroughs,
the eventual creator of Tarzan, wanted to test his Michigan Military Academy
team against the best, he arranged football matches with Harvard and Notre Dame.
On November 20, 1895, he received this telegram from Notre Dame: "Will
guarantee $100 or one half gate. Reply. (Signed) P. B. McManus." That was a
few months after Archbishop Ireland's sermon.

Knute Rockne's novel, <The Four Winners: The Head, the Hands, the Foot,
and the Ball>, published in 1925 (and dedicated to Arnold McInerny), falls
into a popular genre of sports novels, and its author was already a legend.

The success of Notre Dame football is a symbol of the presence of Catholicism
in the United States, its leavening of the general culture, its aspiration to
excellence in this life and the next. The fortunes of the team serve a
mesmerizing function for young boys and girls around the country who grow up
dreaming of the golden dome and praying that one day they will be students at
Notre Dame.

In 1946, Evelyn Waugh wrote for <Life> magazine an essay titled
"The American Epoch in the Catholic Church." I doubt that anyone ever
called Waugh soft-hearted, so his generally favorable assessments of Catholic
institutions of higher education in this country can be taken as fair:

Their object is to transform a proletariat into a bourgeoisie; to produce a
faithful laity, qualified to take its part in the general life of the nation;
and in this way they are manifestly successful. Their students are not, in the
main, drawn from scholarly homes. Many of them handle the English language
uneasily. The teaching faculties are still dependent on European recruits for
many of the refinements of learning. But when all this is said, the Englishman,
who can boast no single institution of higher Catholic education and is obliged
to frequent universities that are Anglican in formation and agnostic in temper,
can only applaud what American Catholics have done in the last hundred years.

And like Chesterton before him, Waugh was struck by the combination of piety
and athletic prowess: "The holy places of Notre Dame are crowded before a
football match."

American Catholics claimed as their own Chesterton and Belloc, just as they
claimed Mauriac, Bernanos and Claudel. However arch his attitude towards this
country, American Catholics felt they shared a secret with Evelyn Waugh. The
California he lampooned in <The Loved One> was what you might expect when
the Catholic sensibility is absent.

And Graham Greene was ours, even the later, anti-American Greene. What he
criticized in our country were its flaws, those that revealed themselves to the
eyes of faith. "Whenever people talk of the brotherhood of man, I think of
Cain and Abel," Greene muttered, and it was a welcome antidote to
chuckleheaded hopes for the United Nations as the new communion of saints.

So too in 1948, uncharacteristically on the program of a conference which
asked whether Christian culture is threatened, Greene reminded his listeners
that being threatened by the world is part of the definition of Christian
culture.

When I noticed that so many of the heroes of American Catholics were
foreigners, usually French or English or Irish, I told myself that in a sense
culture is international, and that it is far from peculiar to Catholics to be
interested in the art of lands other than their own.

But of course that wasn't it at all. It was the Catholic thing that counted,
a shared sense of what it all means, the intellectual and imaginative variations
on the personal import of a common creed. American writers like Edwin O'Connor,
Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor were part of that Catholic culture, as were
T. S. Eliot and J. F. Powers. Modernity was equivocal for Catholics because it
seemed a deliberate attempt to sever itself from that essential source of
Western culture, the Christian faith.

In one of his essays on Henry James, Greene searches out passages in which
the Master touched however obliquely on the Church—it was as if, full of the
zeal of the convert, he could not believe that a writer he loved failed to
notice what had become so obvious to him.

C. S. Lewis accounted it a bonus of his conversion that he now shared the
faith out of which the authors he taught as professor of medieval and
Renaissance literature had written. What must it be like to read Dante when his
Catholicism is as esoteric as Homer's mythology?

The contemporary authors O'Malley and others taught were those who wrote out
of that same Catholic faith Dante possessed. For that matter, could a
non-Catholic really understand the horror of Joyce's apostasy? "I will
forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." How
Promethean. How Satanic.

Thus it was that, while consciously separating itself from the outlook of
modernity, the Catholic university was part of a great tradition, one that was
alive and well in our own day. What many regarded as the mainstream was, from
the point of view of the culture that drew its strength from Christian faith, an
aberration—marginal, doomed.

This was the conviction in philosophy as well as in literature and the arts.
The revival of Thomism was meant to redeem the modern mind from the errors into
which it had wandered. Leo XIII saw the alternative to Christian culture, the
long sad story that began with Descartes's placement of the human subject at the
center of things, not simply as a threat to the faith but as a disaster for
mankind.

The giants of the Thomistic revival were quite clear in presenting Thomistic
realism as a corrective alternative to what had been happening in philosophy.
One of Maritain's first books was <Antimodern>. Was it a retreat into a
safer past? At the time of <Aeterni Patris>, the Pope had become the
prisoner of the Vatican, modernity seemed triumphant, and the encyclical might
have been heard simply as the plaint of the defeated.

The American philosopher Josiah Royce was not alone among non-Catholic
philosophers in welcoming <Aeternis Patris>, but there were few outside
the fold who regarded modern philosophy as largely a mistake. Modernists within
the Church were soon to urge Catholic theologians and philosophers to learn the
lessons of modernity and to adopt those very aspects of it against which Leo had
warned. Their message was, in part, that the Church should join the winning
side.

How prophetic Leo's letter looks now, more than a century after its
appearance. Surely this is one of the lessons of Alasdair MacIntyre's
magnificent Gifford lectures, <Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry>. The
crisis of modernity is all around us, in the universities, in the arts, in the
culture at large. Nowadays, philosophers celebrate their own nihilism, critics
deconstruct our literature, sexual perversity is no longer the avocation of the
affluent but a movement that demands that society accept its Humpty-Dumpty
logic.

How providential for our country and indeed for the world that our
grandparents supported the founding of a vast network of Catholic colleges and
universities by religious orders and bishops.

These institutions have never been more necessary than now.

Ralph McInerny is Michael P. Grace Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Notre Dame, and director of the Maritain Center there. This article first
appeared in slightly longer form in Notre Dame magazine (Summer 1991). This
article is taken from the Spring 1995 issue of "The Latin Mass",
published by the Foundation for Catholic Reform, 1331 Red Cedar Circle, Fort
Collins, CO 80524-2005.